Tuesday, May 11, 2021
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Funding for Broadband
The Secretary of the Treasury is issuing this Interim Final Rule to implement the Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Fund and the Coronavirus Local Fiscal Recovery Fund established under the American Rescue Plan Act. Communities or households facing economic insecurity before the pandemic were less able to weather business closures, job losses, or declines in earnings and were less able to participate in remote work or education due to the inequities in access to reliable and affordable broadband infrastructure. Through the Fiscal Recovery Funds, Congress provided State, local, and Tribal governments with significant resources to respond to the COVID-19 public health emergency and its economic impacts through four categories of eligible uses. Section 602 and section 603 contain the same eligible uses; the primary difference between the two sections is that section 602 establishes a fund for States, territories, and Tribal governments and section 603 establishes a fund for metropolitan cities, nonentitlement units of local government, and counties. Sections 602(c)(1) and 603(c)(1) provide that funds may be used including to make necessary investments in water, sewer, or broadband infrastructure. Necessary investments include projects that are required to maintain a level of service that, at least, meets applicable health-based standards, taking into account resilience to climate change, or establishes or improves broadband service to unserved or underserved populations to reach an adequate level to permit a household to work or attend school, and that are unlikely to be met with private sources of funds.
The Coronavirus Capital Projects Fund (CCPF) will address many challenges laid bare by the pandemic, especially in rural America and low- and moderate-income communities, helping to ensure that all communities have access to the high-quality, modern infrastructure needed to thrive, including internet access. The American Rescue Plan provides $10 billion for payments to States, territories, and Tribal governments to carry out critical capital projects that directly enable work, education, and health monitoring, including remote options, in response to the public health emergency. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (American Rescue Plan) established the $10 billion Capital Projects Fund to provide funding to states, territories, and Tribal governments to carry out critical capital projects directly enabling work, education, and health monitoring, including remote options, in response to the public health emergency with respect to the Coronavirus Disease (COVID–19). The focus of the Capital Projects Fund on the continuing need for connectivity in response to the COVID-19 pandemic complements the broader range of uses, including for broadband infrastructure, of the American Rescue Plan’s separate $350 billion Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds. Treasury will begin to accept applications for review in the summer of 2021 and will issue guidance before that date.
The Federal Communications Commission unanimously adopted final rules to implement the Emergency Connectivity Fund Program. This $7.17 billion program, funded by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, will enable schools and libraries to purchase laptop and tablet computers, Wi-Fi hotspots, and broadband connectivity for students, school staff, and library patrons in need during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Report and Order establishes the rules and policies governing the Emergency Connectivity Fund Program. The new rules define eligible equipment and services, service locations, eligible uses, and reasonable support amounts for funding provided. It designates the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) as the program administrator with FCC oversight and leverages the processes and structures used in the E-Rate program for the benefit of schools and libraries already familiar with the E-Rate program. It also adopts procedures to protect the limited funding from waste, fraud, and abuse.
The Emergency Broadband Benefit Program launches on May 12. Here's what you need to know
Funding - Congress dedicated $3.2 billion to the Emergency Broadband Benefit.
Discounts – eligible households can receive discounts off monthly broadband service:
- Up to $50 per month for eligible households
- Up to $75 per month for households on qualifying Tribal lands.
- One-time discount of up to $100 to purchase a laptop, desktop computer, or tablet from participating providers if they contribute more than $10 and less than $50 toward the purchase price.
Please Note: This will be applied directly to the consumers’ monthly bill. There is a limit of one monthly service discount and one device discount per household.
Eligibility – if one person in the household:
- Demonstrates low income, at or below 135% of the Federal Poverty level;
- Participates in assistance programs including SNAP, Medicaid, or Lifeline;
- Relies on free and reduced-price school meals;
- Received a Federal Pell Grant during the current award year;
- Suffered a large loss in income during pandemic due to job loss or furlough since February 29, 2020 and the household had a total income in 2020 at or below $99,000 for single filers and $198,000 for joint filers;
- Meets other eligibility criteria for a participating provider's existing lowincome or COVID-19 program.
Providers Near You – Over 825 broadband providers are taking part in the program. The benefit is available to eligible new, prior, and existing customers of participating providers.
Sign Up – There are 3 ways to sign up:
1) contact a participating provider to sign up;
2) enroll online at www.getemergencybroadband.org; or
3) sign up via mail.
To learn more or get a mail-in application, call (833) 511-0311.
Temporary – But remember, this is a temporary program. When it ends, participating providers must give notice to customers and inform them of the cost for their plan after the discount ends. Importantly, consumers will need to opt-in to continue with the service.
As we kick off our Infrastructure Week series, we wanted to show the scope of the problem ourselves. This map shows where the broadband problem is worst — the areas where the difficulty of reliably connecting to the internet has gotten bad enough to become a drag on everyday life. Specifically, the colored-in areas show US counties where less than 15 percent of households are using the internet at broadband speed, defined as 25Mbps download speed. (That’s already a pretty low threshold for calling something “high-speed internet,” but since it’s the Federal Communications Commission’s standard, we’ll stick with it.)
Maps like this are important because, for much of the past decade, the scale of the problem has been maddeningly difficult to pin down. Most large-scale assessments of American broadband access rely on FCC data, a notoriously inaccurate survey drawn from ISPs’ own descriptions of the areas they serve. Even as the commission tries to close the broadband gap, its maps have been misleading policymakers about how wide the gap really is. Instead of the FCC’s data, we drew on an anonymized dataset collected by Microsoft through its cloud services network, published in increments by the company over the past 18 months. If the FCC monitors the connections that providers say they’re offering, this measures what they’re actually getting. You can roll over specific counties to see the exact percentage of households connected at broadband speed, and the data is publicly available on GitHub if you want to check our work or drill down further.
Any national infrastructure package should include 21st century digital infrastructure—not only investments in core digital infrastructure, such as broadband and government IT systems, but also hybrid-digital upgrades to existing physical infrastructure to improve its performance. There is an array of areas any infrastructure bill should target to ensure digital infrastructure deployment.
- Broadband infrastructure in rural areas is critical and the investment should focus first and foremost on unserved areas.24 This should include support for both fixed and mobile broadband.
- With the need for increased resiliency of the electric grid, any package should include significant investments to modernize, expand, secure, and digitize it. This should include well-funded pilot programs to integrate and test IT technologies on the grid in particular locations.
- Because the U.S. lags behind other nations in the development of smart cities, any package should include a nationwide smart cities program to help cities and towns use digital technologies to improve operations and quality of life.25 In addition, it should fund pilot programs to support smart farms, smart factories, smart health care, smart buildings (especially federal buildings), and other systems upgraded by connected sensors and analytics.
- The initiative should include funding for states to upgrade physical infrastructure, such as water, waste systems, and roads and bridges. It should ensure that funding can be spent on hybrid digital technology solutions, including using funds to upgrade cybersecurity measures.
- Funds should be allocated to ensure all communities, no matter their race or zip code, have access to next-generation supercomputing and quantum computing.26
- Any package should include significant funding to help local, state, and national government agencies upgrade legacy and outdated IT systems, including but not limited to investing in cloud-based IT systems that offer both secure, mobile-friendly online services to government customers, and remote work capabilities for employees and contractors.
Tired of waiting for connectivity solutions to come to town, one Minnesota community has instead partnered with a local telephone cooperative to build a fiber network reaching every home and business in the city. In embarking on its journey to improve local Internet access six years ago, Long Prairie (pop. 3,300) ended up partnering with one of the most aggressive fiber network builders in the state - Consolidated Telephone Company (CTC) - on a solution that meets local needs. The two finished a ubiquitous Fiber-to-the-Home build in 2018, with CTC now owning and operating the network.
Long Prairie residents in the city now have access to service tiers from the CTC-owned and operated network starting at 100 Mbps (Megabits per second) symmetrical for $50/month, 250 Mbps for $60/month, 500 Mbps for $80, and 1 Gbps for $100/month.
Radio and television stations’ local content – particularly news – provides great value for audiences on the major technology platforms. However, broadcasters are not fairly compensated for this valuable content because of the way the markets currently operate. The reason for that is simple – these tech platforms have substantial market power in their provision of services, and they use that power for advancing their own growth and benefit to the detriment of local broadcast journalism. Local news produced by local broadcast stations continues to be the most trusted, highly consumed and valued news source. Local news is very costly to produce, and yet its consumption and the advertising dollars that support it are shifting to technology platforms where broadcasters cannot fully recoup their investment or earn the economic benefits they create for the platforms because of unequal bargaining power. This competitive imbalance puts a severe strain on the economics of local broadcasters and threatens their continued investment in local journalism.
For those of us who spent the last four years fighting a totally depressing battle against the last Administration’s nuclear attack on the public interest, springtime has brought the hope of rebirth, regeneration, and reform. In media and telecom (my beat) we already see the budding of policies and programs to reverse the nation’s embarrassing broadband shortfalls. Broadband is now seen as essential infrastructure, as important to twenty-first-century life as electricity was to the twentieth. Not only that, but understanding broadband as a civil right seems to be taking hold. Better late than never. No one can be a fully functioning and participating citizen in today’s society without access to high-speed and affordable communications. The pandemic demonstrated how necessary broadband is for our jobs, our schooling, our health, our civic dialogue, even our practice of religions. To see the Biden Administration and many in Congress making broadband a national priority is truly encouraging. Tens of millions of households are waiting for their tickets to a better future.
[Michael Copps served as a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission from May 2001 to December 2011 and was the FCC's Acting Chairman from January to June 2009. He is now with Common Cause.]
Beyond supporting students, information being collected by schools across the country could prove useful when addressing the problem of the digital divide. The work to close the so-called homework gap, exacerbated when the coronavirus pandemic shut down schools and forced 50 million students to suddenly adopt remote learning, could also provide the federal and state governments a roadmap toward fixing the broader digital divide problem. The homework gap is a subset of a much larger digital divide that exists between people with and people without access to high-speed internet. For millions of Americans, the digital divide exists because they live in a rural part of the country where broadband infrastructure simply isn't available. For other families in rural and suburban markets, broadband service may be available but unaffordable. It's an issue that has dogged policy makers for years.
Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org) and Robbie McBeath (rmcbeath AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.
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